Quick proposal for making packager sponsorship slightly easier

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

I recently filed https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1499 with the
goal of making the process just a bit simpler for new packagers.  The text of
my proposal follows.  Please make sure that substantial comments are
made on the ticket to ensure that FESCo sees them.

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tl;dr: Relax the requirement that sponsors be directly involved in the
package review process.

Sponsors are responsible (but not solely responsible) for shepherding
people through the packaging process. They should know how to do
reviews, but there is nothing so special about a packager's first review
that it cannot be handled by the regular packager community. We trust
packagers to do every other package review, after all. We also allow new
packagers to be sponsored without actually going through the package
review process at all via the comaintainer process so what we appear to
be emphasizing is that someone is there to assist and monitor the new
contributor and not that the contributor make it through the arduous
process of a package review with a highly restricted pool of reviewers.

Proposal: Decouple sponsorship from the review process.

Allow the community to do reviews as normal. Remove the requirement that
the first review be done by a sponsor.

Emphasize that sponsors can sponsor anyone separate from the review
process. They can sponsor them before the review has been done, after it
has been done, in the middle of the process, whatever. (This is all
currently true in any case, but the process documents link most
everything to the completion of a review.)

Notes: Obviously sponsorship should still be tied to package maintenance
in some way; sponsoring someone without any intention of having them
work on a package in some way is pointless.

Note that I do not intend to imply that sponsors need not know how to do
proper package reviews. The guidelines for becoming a sponsor currently
and should continue to specify that having done some package reviews is
important to the process. The same goes for actually maintaining
packages. Sponsors should know both the mechanics of maintaining
packages and the standards for package quality.

Hopefully this will open up the actual reviewing to the community as a
whole, eliminating one bottleneck.

We could potentially end up with people who have completed package
reviews but who cannot yet actually import their packages. This would be
worse than having people waiting in the sponsorship queue, because they
actually did more work and someone from the community actually did some
work as well. This could be mitigated through vigilance coupled with
some scripting, or additional process in the packager-sponsor trac for
requests that happen to fall through the cracks.

Searching bugzilla for NEEDSPONSOR tickets still open with
fedora-review+ set should be a reasonable first-pass report for those
waiting. Mailing a filtered version of that to the sponsors would
probably be effective but annoying.

 - J<